Before every game mechanic had a wiki page, somebody had to sit down and write the damn guide.
Tony Jiang did.
Visit Tony’s Super Smash Bros. N64 guide
The site covers the original 1999 Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 64: basic mechanics, single-player play, multiplayer strategy, items, bonuses, every playable character and every stage.
Jiang explains that he bought the game in 2003, after the N64 was already outdated, because he had enjoyed playing it with friends. Then he built a guide from his own experience.
There is an especially good period detail in his introduction. He says the guide is mostly text because he did not have Nintendo’s permission to use game images, making screenshots would take work, and images would consume space on his web server.
That sentence is practically a fossil layer.
Today bandwidth and storage are cheap enough that a strategy site can casually autoplay video. Here, screenshots were an editorial budget decision.
Tested on an emulator, verified on the real machine
Jiang says he used an emulator and ROM image to test moves because it was more convenient, then verified the results on his actual Nintendo 64.
That is a surprisingly solid little methodology for a fan guide.
The site is structured rather than dumped into one giant walkthrough. Each character gets move lists and strategy pages. Stages get their own guides. There are separate sections for single-player scoring, items, multiplayer and emulation.
It is also personal in the way old game sites usually were. The author is not pretending to be an editorial institution. He tells you what he played, why he liked it, what tools he used and what he thinks is worth reading.
That matters in 2026 because game documentation increasingly gets detached from the people who actually discovered and tested things. A surviving fan guide preserves not just information about a game, but the process by which players learned it.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages like this: narrow, stubborn little knowledge bases that were useful long before somebody figured out how to monetize “content.”
Tony’s guide does not need a redesign.
It needs to stay online.